Our first event in the 2026 Learning Series features award-winning poet Karen Donovan. She’ll read from her new book, Letters to Boulders, and discuss her unique blend of art and science on Monday, March 7, at 7 pm. The event will take place in the Salem Family Auditorium at the Barrington Public Library.
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Letters to Boulders has been called “a poetic meditation on the mutable qualities of the earth.” A collection of short prose written in response to a curation of rocks, the book features full-color photographs of rocks paired with prose pieces that range in style from memoir to manifesto.
Each piece of writing is titled by a term from the geosciences. Letters to Boulders adopts the look of a field guide but delivers something more creative, transforming basic geological concepts and motifs through metaphor and storytelling.
The rocks are the stars here. Drawn from a tiny East Bay beach, they are a mix of breeds – granite, quartz, gneiss, schist, sandstone, mudstone, conglomerate – as are all the writerly forms employed: narrative, argument, speculation, allegory, reportage, confession, list, prose poem, ode. Filled with “grit and fizz and nerve,” Letters to Boulders speaks about life on earth, past and present, a story that is essentially about timescale. We may indeed be haunted by brevity, it says, but there is solace in the idea of deep time and the reliable heft of rocks collected by hand.
About Karen Donovan
Karen Donovan is a prizewinning poet and the author of Letters to Boulders, a book of prose and photographs published by Wet Cement Press in 2025. Her other books of poetry and prose are Monad+Monadnock, Planet Parable, Aard-vark to Axolotl, Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients, and Fugitive Red. She lives in Riverside.